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Thursday, May 16, 2013

Bathroom Tile Love

So...the hubs and I spent a good portion of our vacation huddled and cramped in a small bathroom tiling our shower. The hubs was the master cutter and I laid the tile. We laid the subway tile up to the window then had to work on getting the window completed before we could moved forward with the rest.

After spending WAY too many hours and taking WAY too many Ibuprofen for the back pain we ended up with a frickn' beautiful tile job that we are pretty proud of!

The hubs is a perfectionist and had a difficult time with placing the sea glass tile inside the window. The spacers we had were too wide so we used cardboard strips in between each tile in order to give it the right space that it needed. The bottom of the window we the hubs pitched the mortar and tile in such a way that if any water that gets in the window will just drain down the wall and into the shower pan.

We tossed around tons of ideas for how to finish the window and once we agreed on the sea glass inside the window, we weren't sure how to frame out the window. I looked all over Pinterest and couldn't really find anything that helped, so the hubs and I jumped in the car and went to Home Depot to figure it out. We found these which I loved right away and ended up using them to frame out the window:

The hubs then laid them around the edge of the window, tweaking and making adjustments until they were set and he felt comfortable with how they looked. On each side of the window he started out by finding the middle then worked his way out and made any necessary cuts.

For the corners of the window frame we ended up using a square blue-ish piece of glass tile which worked out perfect!

As soon as the bottom of the window was done I was SUPER confident on how it was going to turn out in the end and I was so excited!

Three long, agonizing hours later we had the window done....(we DID NOT expect the window to take that long at all...) but it was SO worth it!

After the window was done we were clear for take off to finish the rest of the walls and began the process of laying all the tile. We actually forgot to lay the sea glass border on the right side of the below picture initially (that was the first wall that we did the border on) and ended up popping out the subway tile and laying the sea glass in. At first we talked about whether it would be worth it to pop out the subway tile and holy crap are we happy we did. It adds just that little bit of character that we were looking for!

We absolutely love the way the hex tile, mixed with the subway tile give the bathroom a vintage feel!

Once the tile was all set and dried we got to grouting the walls and floors, which I found to be kind of fun! Who knew what a difference a little grout could make! In this post we originally talked about using a dark brown grout on the floors and white grout on the walls, but once we were done tiling opted to use white grout for all the tile to give it a seamless feel. We also felt like using white grout all around would make the room appear to be bigger, which is definitely a decision that we were happy we went with.

So to do a little side by side comparison of how well tile can really finish and complete a room:

And after a little tile:

We still need to seal the grout, which is something I'll be doing this weekend, but we are so happy with how things are turning out!!